AI-powered coffee experience

My Role: Senior Product Design
Collaborators: Design, Business, Tech
2024 25

Defining the AI experience

Nestlé, world’s largest food and beverage company, set out to reimagine the coffee experience for Nespresso’s next generation of public machines. The project focused on integrating AI into the experience, using both conversational interaction and a digital avatar to make ordering more intuitive, personal, and smart.

Role

Combining research, UX strategy, conversational design, art direction and product design to shape an AI-powered avatar and its’ complementary interface.

Nespresso end-to-end journey map, from approach to enjoyment and beyond — Mapping the end-to-end journey revealed opportunities to improve the coffee experience.

Challenges

Global design

Aligning an international team across time zones, languages, and cultural contexts.

Emerging field

Defining interaction patterns for an AI experience without established conventions.

AI fatigue

Finding a genuine user need and making AI experience that feels useful rather than gimmicky.

Problem Statement

How might we define a meaningful AI coffee experience, that turns into an interaction that feels intuitive, personal, and canny?

Mapping the traits of AI entities — Mapping AI traits revealed distinct opportunities for the avatar.

Building Conversation Scenarios for Human/AI Interaction. AI is driving the reinvention of every CX/US, transforming the object and the output from how we design.

Process & insights

We identified AI interactions that could add value and translated them into a curated set of features spanning UX, UI, and technology across mobile and machine interfaces.

Designing for AI meant mapping capabilities, scenarios, and conversational behavior rather than following traditional UX maps and user flows. We developed three conversational archetypes, each with distinct motivations and behaviors, to shape the experience and guide LLM training.

Attribute group mood board — Mood board exploring the avatar’s defining attributes.

First design iteration: a fluid, expressive avatar with a distinct presence, without feeling overly human.

Prototype & Solution

We designed a visual avatar that translates Nestle’s Nespresso brand, into a distinct AI personality, guiding users through a conversational coffee-ordering experience. The work culminated in a complete interaction flow, including edge cases, and a video prototype demonstrating the experience in action.